Travel Blogs from Yancheng

We got word on Thursday that Dr Chen was taking the senior management team and the foreign teachers away for a night to Yancheng, staying in a five star hotel. Sweet!

It took four hours to drive there, and then an hour sitting in the van waiting for all the Chinese staff to book in. We were then given room cards and told just to walk straight through the lobby to the elevator and go to our rooms. The reason? It takes too ...

... there), he took us back and Candy (one of the Chinese English teachers) took us to the canteen.

The canteen was an experience. Middle school students ate in one canteen, primary students ate in a different canteen and then there was a special area for teaching staff, if the teaching staff had the best area I dread to think what the students were eating in. Everything in the canteen was made out of metal, it stunk and it was really grimy. The food was not great, ...

... make money from sending all the foreign teacher to open an account and that we can’t actually use that bank account outside of Guilin! Since we got sent to Huainan we needed a new bank account in order to get paid. We went to one Bank of China branch, waited for 10-15 minutes not knowing what the hell was going on and then Bruce suddenly said ‘No, we go. They don’t do this here’ – so we had to get back in the van and ...

... 1-10 in English and Chinese. Honestly, it has been one of the best moments I have had so far in china and I really believe that I and Ruby got more out of that situation than the kids did, it was so nice to be accepted and to interact with the children and their parents.

We headed back to the hostel after that, it’s been quite a long day again and we were all tired so we just chilled out for a bit and started researching our first trip – we ...

... that actually feels like more than a wooden crate. It’s like 5* luxury compared to what we had accommodation wise the last 11 nights!

We met the couple that were already at the hotel, I didn’t really catch their names, they were from America and had been in China a year already after working in Korea for 4 years but they were so unsociable and couldn’t understand us let alone want to interact with us. They came to the barbecue with ...